Review: Creating Conceptual Comics: Storytelling and Techniques

How often can you say you truly learned something completely new in a design workshop? For me, it had been a long time. But there I was, working hands-on with paper and pencil, dreaming up great ideas, and experimenting with visual communication in a medium I hadn't before seriously considered for the purpose. If you have a chance to attend this workshop, do it! If nothing else, it'll help you remember why you wanted to be a designer in the first place.

Hinton, Andrew. UXmatters (2006). Articles>Reviews>Technical Illustration

Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research

With all the attention to usability over the last five years or so and the wonderful swelling of information-architecture-related books just since 2001, you would think we would have enough methods and advice to keep our projects in perfect tack. But so many of these resources, excellent though they are, tend to be more about how to pilot the ship than how to find that all-important star and keep it in sight.

Hinton, Andrew. Boxes and Arrows (2004). Articles>Usability>Methods

Review: Small Pieces, Big Thoughts

'Small Pieces Loosely Joined' is touted on the cover as 'A Unified Theory of the Web.' But its author, David Weinberger, knows better. And he says as much in the book. It's a unified theory, but not the kind you sum up in a tidy little equation.

Hinton, Andrew. Boxes and Arrows (2002). Articles>Reviews>Information Design